Restructuring and Rescaling Water Governance in Mining Contexts: The Co-Production of Waterscapes in Peru

TLDR

Water governance is a central focus in policy and scholarship, yet analyses of its scalar politics remain underdeveloped. The study examines how Peru’s expanding mining sector reshapes and rescales water governance. The authors introduce the concept of waterscape to analyze how mining reshapes social relations, technologies, institutions, and discourses across spatial and temporal scales beyond the watershed. They argue that waterscape analysis overcomes the limitations of material, scale‑bound, and hierarchy‑centric approaches to water governance.

Abstract

The governance of water resources is prominent in both water policy agendas and academic scholarship. Political ecologists have made important advances in reconceptualising the relationship between water and society. Yet, while they have stressed both the scalar dimensions, and the politicised nature, of water governance, analyses of its scalar politics are relatively nascent. In this paper, we consider how the increased demand for water resources by the growing mining industry in Peru reconfigures and rescales water governance. In Peru, the mining industry’s thirst for water draws in, and reshapes, social relations, technologies, institutions and discourses that operate over varying spatial and temporal scales. We develop the concept of waterscape to examine these multiple ways in water is co-produced through mining, and become embedded in changing modes and structures of water governance, often beyond the watershed scale. We argue that an examination of waterscapes avoids the limitations of thinking about water in purely material terms, structuring analysis of water issues according to traditional spatial scales and institutional hierarchies, and taking these scales and structures for granted.